Smithsonian Museum to Digitize Black Families' Home Videos

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is to digitize the home videos of African-American families for posterity, it has been announced.  

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"The Great Migration Home Movie Project" is intended to preserve personal narratives that "serve as an invaluable tool for understanding and re-framing black moving image history, and provide a much-needed visualization of African American history and culture."  

The museum project will allow access to a reservoir of past events, including some of the key moments in history in which African-Americans demonstrated their resilience against racism. 

"In our home movie collections, we see the resiliency of civil rights activists in 1963 in Danville, Virginia; the optimism and drive of empowered youth in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community of Brooklyn, New York during the 1960s; and the rooted spirituality of black Oklahomans in the face of race riots and segregation in 1920s Tulsa, Oklahoma," the website notes. 

The project focusses on "media conservation, digitization and dissemination efforts for African-American media art and the public's family histories." It will help digitize formats such as the motion-picture film; 16mm, Super 8 and Regular 8mm; obsolete videotape formats such as open-reel video, and several other formats. 

"The museum explores what it means to be an American and share how American values like resiliency, optimism and spirituality are reflected in African-American history and culture," the website notes.